A biography for Richard Powershasn’t been written yet.
“Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.”
“If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?”
“Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.”
“My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.”
“I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.”
“The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.”
“Everything interests me.”
“For me, university was just awful because it was closing one door after the other of all these candy shops of professional possibilities.”
“It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.”
“The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.”
“We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.”
“I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.”
“The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.”
“Reading is the last act of secular prayer.”
“This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.”
“Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.”
“We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.”
“I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.”
“I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.”
“I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.”